Tobii Eye Control Technology Impresses at CES 2012

Tobbi Technology, a company focused on eye-control technology, had on hand at CES 2012 an arcade game they called "Eye Asteroids". Far from being the unresponsive, mildly-clever-but-useless piece of technology one would expect, the game functions well. After about 15 seconds of calibration the machine understands the movement of your eyes and off you go, looking at asteroids and blowing them up. It's not perfect. The response of the system felt a little delayed and sometimes didn't seem to be working at all. But it was fully functional and at a crowed CES 2012 it stood out among a lot of techno garbage.

Sara Hyleen, Tobii's Marketing Manager spoke with IBTimesTV about not only their gaming machine, but also the line of laptops they had brought to CES 2012 to demonstrate more practical uses for the technology. "The next step as we see it is really integration into consumer electronics like laptops and desktop computers. We also see a wide range of niche applications like integration into medical devices for surgeons and other people working with imaging," she said from the floor of CES 2012.

Eyes would seem to be an unruly method of control. Eyes, unlike our hands and fingers are constantly moving. One could imagine considerable troubles with stray clicks and what not with one of these computers. However, Hyleen explained that Tobii intends on creating computers which combine traditional methods of input supplemented with the eye-control technology.

With a price tag of $15,000 don't expect to go out and buy any eye-control arcade games any time soon. But the technology has arrived, it does work, and it very well may shape our digital interactions in the very near future, perhaps even before the next CES.

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With Reporting by Marisa Krystian